9 Customer Experience priorities for the new year

What are your Customer Experience (CX) priorities for the new year? If
you have to pick one thing that you would most want to achieve, what
would it be? Name it, claim it, and make it true. There are probably
fewer barriers to success than you fear.

What are your Customer Experience priorities for the next year?

We did this make-a-wish exercise at a recent client workshop and
came up with a rather long list. We then tackled the perceived
obstacles one by one and came up with a plan for the year that was
much, much better than anyone had hoped for at the outset. This is
such a valuable thing to do.

For what will you wish?

Higher response rates: Don’t everybody want this? Especially
from hard-to-reach segments such a young mobile-first
customers. But remember that you can only have one wish; are you
clear on what you would do with the data?

New improved Voice of Customer (VOC) platform: Perhaps you have
outgrown your existing platform; perhaps you have outsourced the
research to an agency and want to take it in-house, or the other
way around.

Social media management and analysis: Love it, hate it, can’t
ignore it. You need social media for customer engagement and crave
it for advocacy. It is where all the cool kids hang out, isn’t it?
But there are so many and it is hard to use them right and
difficult to know what works. Tools will help (a lot).

Improved natural language (text) analytics: There is gold in
the verbatim comments from your customers, if only you could
process them at scale to get practical insights you can deploy in
your operations. But do you go for the solution integrated in your
VOC platform or for a stand-alone best-in-class general text
analytics engine? And in either case, does it give you the insights
you need to change the business?

Native voice analytics: It is often much easier to gather
verbatim feedback using voice. (I wish more VOC platforms would
make this easy on the mobile devices.) But if you thought text
analytics was difficult then you have something else waiting for
you here. And if you are already doing it, then you know how
difficult it is to get right. Fortunately, the vendors are getting
much better. Hint: look for call centre technology providers like
Nice (www.nice.com) who recently acquired what was left of one of
the companies for which I used to work.

Leadership buy-in: Customer Experience is a journey of
transformation. Sustaining leadership engagement and commitment is
difficult but critical. Expectations will at times be out of line
with your ability to deliver. This is a topic for a whole other
article….

Clear operational priorities: Do your functional managers
really know what change to prioritise to improve the customer
experience? They likely have a long list of operational KPIs that
are all important, and which they know are important, but you
usually can’t improve everything for everybody all at once. Are
your CX analytics able to give them clear operational priorities
for different customer segments? Eg ‘improve the call centre
handling time from A to B before you even look at the wait time’?

Trusted financial impact: If you are struggling to get your CX
change initiative prioritised at the leadership table, ask yourself
if the people at that table really believe in the financial
impact. Are you able to track it robustly from previous
initiatives? Do you have a CX Economics model
that show you the impact of CX on the metrics that your CEO cares
about, be that EBITDA, lifetime value, gross margins, or even
revenues? If not, why not?

Employee Engagement and Experience: CX isn’t all about
metrics, processes, and tools; perhaps not even mainly about any
of that. Your employees who are the ones who design and deliver
the experience is probably where you start and where you end. All
the other things are really there to help this outcome.

Something else? What did we miss? Let us know in the comments on
LinkedIn.

If you are looking for ways to re-invigorate and revitalise your CX or CEM Programme, then talk to
us: we have a distinct approach we call CX Impact that
directly addresses points 6-8 above and we have successfully helped
organizations like yours.

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CYBAEA

CYBAEA are value and growth architects for the data economy. We are passionate about value creation and delivering commercial results. We help organizations identify and act upon opportunities in Customer Value Management (CVM), Customer Experience (CX) and Advocacy, and Innovation and Growth.